Innholdsfortegnelse for January/February 2025 i Popular Mechanics

WAY BACK IN 1508, WITH ONLY LIMited tools at his disposal, Nicolaus Copernicus developed a celestial model of a heliocentric planetary system, which he described in his landmark work De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. It was a complete overhaul of our conception of the universe—one that, unfortunately, earned him the ire of the Catholic church for decades after his death—and forever changed the way we look at the stars. And now, some intrepid amateur archaeologists may have stumbled upon one of the very humble tools that once aided Copernicus in his groundbreaking work. According to La Brújula Verde, an amateur archaeological exploration group called the Warmińska Grupa Eksploracyjna was searching in the gardens of the Archcathedral Basilica of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Saint Andrew in northern Poland.…

ACLAY FIGURINE HAS SPENT MILLENNIA incomplete, waiting at the bottom of a lake for its long-dead craftsman to finish the Iron Age–era statuette. During work at the underwater archaeological site of Gran Carro di Bolsena in Aiola, Italy, researchers pulled the rudimentary clay creation from the volcanic Lake Bolsena. The unfinished clay figure of a woman, dating from between the 10th and 9th centuries B.C.E., looks more like a first draft than a ready-made piece of art. But just because the clay worker didn’t fully finish the figurine doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of clues available to show how it fits into Italian life in the Iron Age. The feminine-looking, palm-sized statuette is so fresh that it “still shows the marks of the fingerprints” of its maker, according to a…

JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT on December 17, 2023, a moonless sky is tempered only by the dim glow of navigation screens displaying the coordinates of a rowboat’s position some 412 nautical miles off the coast of the Western Sahara. Two women sit at the oars near the end of a two-hour shift, their 28-foot craft dwarfed by the 30-foot waves pivoting them back and forth like an unhinged seesaw in churning, disorganized seas. Inside cramped cabins at each end of the vessel, two additional crew members are attempting to sleep on soggy mattresses, ravaged by seasickness, amped up on adrenaline, and fighting fear as their boat is tossed about like a bath toy. Rowing up and down mountainous waves so close together that their tiny boat at times feels almost vertical,…

WORM → There’s an invasive species of worm making itself known in Texas once again—the hammerhead flatworm. These worms are toxic, hard to kill, and dangerous to native critters like earthworms, but likely pose little danger to humans or larger animals. Experts encourage people to kill these worms on site, and to avoid touching them directly, as the toxins they produce can irritate skin. —Jackie Appel LUNGFISH → An unassuming freshwater fish contains the longest genomic sequence ever discovered, measuring some 30 times the length of the human DNA chain. Researchers found that the South American lungfish has around 90 billion base pairs in its genetic code, thanks to “jumping genes,” which have continued to expand the length of the fish’s sequence over millions of years. The lungfish is the…

TODAY, THE UNIVERSE AS WE KNOW IT IS governed by four fundamental forces: the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, electromagnetism, and gravity. However, these four forces aren’t exactly as distinct as you think. Electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force, for example, were once the same force—the electroweak interaction. This force existed only in the early days of the universe—or, should we say, early trillionths of a second of the universe—before the Higgs mechanism (also known as the Mexican hat mechanism, due to its shape) separated the two forces and applied mass to the Z and W bosons. Those bosons, in turn, carry the weak nuclear force, which is the thing responsible for a type of radioactive decay. The electroweak force existed only at temperatures approaching 1,015 Kelvin (about…

On July 9, 1962, the night sky above the Pacific Ocean, from Hawaii to New Zealand, suddenly became illuminated by brilliant light, as if it were the middle of the day. A stunning artificial aurora appeared, creating a glow of green, yellow, and red, which lingered for less than an hour. Then came the blackouts. The streets of Hawaii became unlit, telephone service was disrupted, burglar alarms went off. What looked like a beautiful light show from Earth was the result of the biggest nuclear bomb ever detonated in space. From a tiny island in the middle of the North Pacific Ocean, the U.S. had launched a 1.4-me g at on nuclear warhead, a weapon test and a display of power during a particularly tense period of the Cold War. The…

ON A SUNNY AFTERNOON IN MAY 1980, CAROLYN DRIEDGER AND MINDY BRUGMAN PULLED UP TO Coldwater II, an outpost for United States Geological Survey researchers on a ridge near Mount St. Helens in Washington. For the last five weeks or so—after a century-plus of dormancy—the volcano seemed to be waking up. Driedger, a glaciologist at the Survey, had joined Brugman, a doctoral student studying glaciers on St. Helens, to collect data on the Shoestring glacier and see how its behavior changed as volcanic activity increased. The pair had planned to stay the night and catch a helicopter ride out to the glacier first thing in the morning. But David Johnston, a sandy-haired geologist who had been stationed there for weeks, told them to pack up. He believed the recent increase in…

MOST OF US CAN DO ALL OF OUR shopping with the click of a few buttons, and while that’s certainly convenient, it can make it difficult to keep track of when exactly that new armoire or bookshelf will show up at your doorstep. If you’re really struggling, it might help to take a page out of ancient Turkey’s proverbial book and keep the details written down—on a palm-sized piece of clay. An excavation at the Aççana Mound—the site of the ancient Anatolian city of Alalah, which served as the capital of the Mukis Kingdom and lives on as ruins that date as far back as 4,000 years—recently unearthed a small clay tablet covered in inscribed cuneiform, according to a statement by Mehmet Ersoy, Turkey’s minister of culture and tourism. Researchers…

THERE WAS A TIME WHEN THE TERM “OFF-GRID” conjured images of doomsday preppers or Ted Kaczynski. Today, off-grid is going mainstream, with numerous manufacturers offering equipment to provide the comfort and connectedness we’re accustomed to. Solar in particular has become more accessible, with robust system components available to DIYers. Some reasons to choose off-grid energy include spiraling utility costs and the increased frequency in grid disruptions by natural disasters. But with remote work becoming more common, many people are choosing to build, and live, in areas where it can be costly to connect to the grid—if it is even available. This is where I found myself when my wife and I bought property to build a seasonal cabin. The location isn’t too remote, with utility poles about 1,500 feet away…